


WorldEater

by myadamantiumheart



Category: Naruto
Genre: Adoptive Parent Hatake Kakashi, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Dai-nana-han | Team 7 (Naruto), Chuunin Exams, Fuuinjutsu Master Umino Iruka, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Minor Character Death, Multi, Parent Umino Iruka, Rating May Change, Team as Family, Training, Umino Iruka-centric, What-If, sort of slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26588143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myadamantiumheart/pseuds/myadamantiumheart
Summary: If the Sandaime had let Iruka adopt Naruto, if children had been allowed to be children a little longer, if men who were raised in bloody fields found themselves a safe place to land.Or, Iruka gets to be a dad, Kakashi gets to make things right, Naruto gets the love he deserves, Sakura gets the acknowledgement she needs, and Sasuke gets dragged bodily back from the flames of the Uchiha legacy.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka
Comments: 20
Kudos: 201





	1. Prophet

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this one for a while and still will be for a while yet, probably, but I really wanted a universe in which the kids got to have the support they deserved and Iruka got to be a papa. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr blogging naruto things @ slowkage!

**Before Kakashi**

* * *

For a long time, Iruka has fought a particularly bitter wolf inside his chest. It is a stubborn, cruel, hateful thing that looks at Naruto and sees, for all its sharp predatory eyesight can do, a boy who holds the world-eater within. Every morning for several years, when his class assembles before him, Iruka has fought that wolf down. He has starved it, crushed it, forcing it smaller and smaller with the sword of Naruto’s sleep-deprived eyes. He batters it with the shield of the boy’s little stomach grumbling in the middle of class and shoots the arrows of his hopeful smiles with a bow of self-determination. The ringing bell of Naruto’s laughter, echoing around the hallways when Shikamaru tells him a joke as they’re coming in from lunch, is a sun rising on a dark night. By the time Naruto is nearly ready to graduate, Iruka thinks of himself as a wolf-killer. A merciless gardener, choking out whatever sour weeds were growing between his ribs. The wolf gasps its last breath as Iruka watches Naruto scrub paint from the Hokage monument, and he buries it without remorse, ten feet deep in unforgiving soil, as he shares ramen with the boy later that evening. 

After that day, Iruka knows, standing above the bones of that nasty creature, that he would do anything to keep Naruto safe. Perhaps his colleagues think him insane for taking the boy under his wing (the world-eater, that ravenous beast, with blood-thirst growing like a cancer in his stomach.) But Iruka knows better. He watches, marvels at the way Naruto sprawls on his floor and bites his tongue in concentration while he tries to grasp concepts that have never fit easily into his too-fast brain. Sometimes, teaching him is like trying to pour tea into a spinning mug. If you pour too slowly, everything will just spin faster, flying out. Pour too fast, and the cup will topple, the liquid going everywhere. If you pour at the right speed, carefully, the teacup will settle the way Naruto does when his eyes grow wide and he is enraptured by whatever concept Iruka is trying to impress upon him on that particular night. Iruka forces vegetables and bedtimes upon him and plants the seeds of a strong ninja within him, and sometimes, late at night- he watches Naruto snore on the spare futon that Iruka will never tell him didn’t exist until the weekend after that first night at Ichiraku. 

Three weeks before the genin promotion, Sandaime calls Iruka for tea on his balcony. Asuma is there, reading some old book of war tactics, and the Sandaime’s smallest grandson is passed out on the couch beside his uncle. 

“You can’t adopt him until you are no longer his teacher,” Hiruzen says to him gently, before he’s even sat down. The petulant child that still lives in his stomach wants to deny it- to obfuscate his motives, the fact that he’s been slowly usurping the spot of Naruto’s long-dead father over the past few months. But Hiruzen knows him better than that, so Iruka sits down. 

“Three more weeks,” he says, almost like he’s begging the old man for something. Asuma laughs behind him, muffled into the book, and Hiruzen smiles. That old smile, the one that always makes something like shame twist in Iruka’s gut, the unsettling feeling of realizing that he had been expecting cruelty where there is none to be found. He should trust Sandaime more, after all these years, but the bitter taste of early loss leaves a mark not easily erased. 

“If you fill out the paperwork now,” Hiruzen murmurs, pushing a cup of tea towards him with deceptively soft hands, “And you bring it here the day after the ceremony, I will stamp it myself.” 

That night, Iruka takes Naruto out to Ichiraku for the second time, and buys him a bowl with double pork and double fish cake. His hands slip a little on the chopsticks and he knocks into the bowl a few times, and his stomach turns and twists itself into knots until he can bring himself to ask. 

“Naruto-” and the boy looks at him, sky-blue eyes so full of trust, without a hint of the world-eater living in his belly. “Do you think, once you’ve become a genin, you might want to move in with me?” And then- Iruka promises himself that he will not  _ ever _ , as long as he lives, forget the way Naruto’s face lights up with joy at the prospect. It is the purest thing Iruka has ever seen, and in the moment, blinded by the uncomplicated, unconditional love being poured out at him, he finds himself tearing up for the first time in a long, long while.

* * *

It is in painful, sharp contrast to the look on Naruto’s face when Iruka reluctantly tells him that he can’t allow him to pass the genin exam with a pitiful excuse for a kage bunshin like that. There is betrayal, of course, but also anger, and then a deep sadness as they both realize that this means he won’t be moving in with Iruka that night as they had planned. He lets Naruto go without following him, understanding the need to sink deep the well of sadness on your own for a while, but then- that’s his biggest mistake, really. Because in that short hour where Iruka focuses on congratulating his other students, wishing deeply that each and every one of them were Naruto, Mizuki offers the boy a life-raft instead. And if Iruka will never forget the happiness on Naruto’s face when he’d offered him a permanent place in his apartment, he will certainly never forget the pain in his chest when he realizes what’s happened later that afternoon. The Sandaime tells them all what he suspects- that Naruto has taken the sacred scroll- and he looks Iruka right in the eyes when he does so.  _ Did you really want this burden, boy?  _ Sandaime asks him with a tired, stone-set jaw. 

Iruka is certain that no matter what Naruto has done now, he really did- he still really does. He wants that burden, even as he takes off towards the old storehouse in the woods, where he knows in his bones that Naruto will be. The bones of the old wolf in his chest shudder, shaking under the earth of Iruka’s convictions, and they try to rise- they try to crawl their way out of the dirt with every one of Mizuki’s taunting words. Iruka takes kunai to the thigh, the shoulder, the forearm. Blood flows, iron in the air, and he watches Naruto’s eyes fill with unsteady tears the longer Mizuki talks. All in a moment, Iruka feels nearly as bitter as the old wolf had been, watching someone try to dissolve his boy into the forest ground with caustic accusations. He does not think at all about his movements when he leaps in front of Mizuki’s shuriken- he feels only the cold tears running down his face, the sharp pain of a blade cutting through bone, and the aching wheeze as the blade tip pierces his right lung. 

Looking down at Naruto, he can see every bit of fear that he’d ever felt himself, trying to grow up on his own in a war-orphan’s apartment. He can see the pain of rejection and the fierce desire to prove himself, and the way his cold tears are falling on Naruto’s cheeks like pitiful, insubstantial rain. He begs Naruto not to believe Mizuki- pleads with him, tells him how much he loves him, and when Naruto bolts, Iruka thinks it might just all be over. But Naruto has been listening to Iruka’s lessons, and so- they manage to overpower Mizuki with tricks, the element of surprise, and the red-iron-blood-fire of the world-eater’s chakra burning brightly in the dim of the night. 

By the time he and Iruka are limping back home, Iruka wheezing desperately with what he suspects is a collapsing lung barely held open by his chakra, the Sandaime has sent ANBU out to meet them. At the front of the formation is an ANBU that Iruka can’t remember seeing before- a tall man with a hood over his head, bare arms gleaming nearly silver in the moonlight, and a porcelain dog mask on. Dog, dog, dog… he must be Inu, then. Iruka heard of him a few times, years ago, while helping Sandaime file S-Classes when he’d first gotten clearance as part of his promotion in the mission room. Another way to keep him out of trouble, he suspected. Inu was feared, of that he was certain. Not that any of the ANBU weren’t feared, but… Unaware of Iruka’s internal tangent, fueled by blood loss and a hazy intake of oxygen, the ANBU gestures two men ahead past the limping shinobi. He’s likely sending them to retrieve Mizuki’s bound, unconscious body from the forest floor. Then, he steps smoothly in to support Iruka’s other side, and Iruka sags gratefully against him at once. 

“Your son is very strong,” Inu says, voice made deeper and raspy by the mask. “You should be proud of him.” Before Iruka can correct him, the boy in question winces, his swollen ankle twisting slightly on his next step, and Inu- moves. Moving would, perhaps, be the wrong word. He slides. He slips one arm under Iruka’s weakening legs, and hoists him up in his arms with impossible ease. “Cat, please grab him.” Another ANBU melts out of the shadows and lifts Naruto up onto his back. He would never admit it, but Iruka can see the relief on Naruto’s face as he realizes that he won’t have to walk all the way back to the village. At some point in the next few minutes, as they speed back towards Konoha, Iruka passes out. He flickers in and out, from one moment to the next- there is Inu, holding him tightly against a strong chest, and then the bright lights of the village are around him, and then- then, Inu is laying him gently on a gurney under blinding white ceilings, and Iruka is spinning down into the darkest, deepest sleep of his entire life. 

* * *

When he wakes, Asuma is at his bedside, reading that same old book of war tactics. When the older man sees Iruka stirring, he sets the book down and leans forward on his knees. The comforting smell of his near-brother envelopes him- tobacco and cedar and firewood smoke- and his calloused hand is warm on Iruka’s shoulder. 

“You have a thing for hopeless cases, don’t you?” Asuma laughs softly, rubbing a gentle thumb across his aching muscle. Iruka stares at the ceiling for a moment, taking stock of everything in his body that hurts. The final tally is, unsurprisingly, quite high. He breathes in, deeper than he’d expected to be able to, before he tries to smile back. 

“I think Naruto finally passing the genin promotion proves he’s not entirely hopeless,” Iruka rasps, but Asuma just shakes his head and laughs again. There is a single lily on his bedside table that is somehow familiar, but he can’t place it. 

“I didn’t mean _him_ ,” Asuma replies, but he doesn’t clarify, and Iruka forgets it soon anyway under the blessed dose of morphine that his nurse comes to deliver. Later, Naruto will burst into his room, barely stirring him from his drug-induced slumber, and Asuma will manhandle the boy down into the other chair with strong hands and a stronger glare. They will wait for him all afternoon, sharing cups of soup that Kurenai brings them. 

And Iruka will wake again hours later to the feeling of a family, for the first time in twelve years. 

* * *

When Sandaime holds the meeting to assign this year’s new jounin-sensei, Iruka hears the whispers before he even hears Sandaime call Naruto’s name, or the scribbling of Aoba’s pen marking it on the scrolls. It’s not the first time he’s heard whispers about Hatake Kakashi. It certainly won’t be the last. But something about it rankles him in a way that it hasn’t before. His shoulders rise, and the back of his neck starts to ache with tension. He’s already sore, barely allowed to leave the hospital in time to make it to the meeting, and holding himself upright so that Asuma’s watchful gaze doesn’t catch him slipping and force him back to hospital takes significant effort. The bindings on his abdomen crinkle slightly as he takes a deep breath, trying to keep his cool, but it’s too late. His attention has been diverted to the shinobi gossiping behind him, their lips dripping with sour rumors about the silver haired man standing at the front of the pack. 

“I thought someone said he was decommissioned from the possibility of being jounin-sensei years ago,” someone whispers behind him. It can’t possibly be true. Iruka has been taking missions from him on and off in the mission room the entire time he’s worked there, but Kakashi had never seemed much older than Iruka himself. True, when Iruka had first started there, at fifteen, Kakashi was already a jounin. But a young one- maybe the youngest. “After the war tribunal, and all.” 

“No,” another man whispers back. “My clan was there. Yondaime-sama and the Yamanakas cleared him. But then he disappeared- my dad always thought it was ANBU that got him. That’s why he hasn’t been a sensei before.” 

“I heard the Friend-Killer just fails every genin they try to send his way anyway,” a woman interjects. And that, somehow, is the last straw, hearing that poisonous nickname slide down his spine like a coroner’s scalpel. He whirls around faster than he probably should, given his state, glaring at them with the best teacher stare he’s ever been able to summon. They go quiet like pre-genin, turning white under their hitai-ate. And then, with the piercing intensity of a lightning strike, Iruka looks back to the front to see the man in question staring right at him. He stares back, unable to look away, until the singular eye he can see curves into a facsimile of a smile and Iruka can feel his ears turning red. The meeting is dismissed before he even realizes, everyone around him hurrying to grab their things and get away from him, lest his ire-filled gaze from earlier lead to any consequences now that they are all freed from the watchful eyes of the Sandaime. Iruka gathers his papers, shuffling them so that his notes on the meeting are hidden beneath other work, just in case Naruto happens to rifle through his things later at home. He’ll find out his jounin sensei tomorrow, like everyone else, if Iruka can help it. No special treatment for living in the teacher’s house.

“You shouldn’t let them bother you,” a pale hand, clad in gloves with heavy metal protectors attached, picks up his school bag and hands it to him. Iruka nearly startles, just barely catching himself with a hand to his stomach as he looks up. And there he is, the man of the hour- Hatake Kakashi, holding Iruka’s satchel with a placid look on his face. 

“What?” Iruka says, rather dumbly. He winces momentarily, straightening as much as he can, and reaches for the satchel. Kakashi doesn’t give it to him, slinging it up on his back with a quick glance downward at Iruka’s abdomen, like he can see straight through to the slice that nearly severed his spine. Like he knows exactly where it is. 

“The rumors,” Kakashi says smoothly. “If your son is strong enough to pass my test, you’ll hear a lot more of them, after all. And they won’t always be so innocuous, either.” Iruka doesn’t totally know what to do with that. Where did he hear someone- someone said something like that before, to him. 

“He’s not my-” but Naruto is, actually, legally his son now. So Iruka changes tactics, reaching out slowly for his satchel. It’s a bad idea to try and grab things quickly from jounin, especially ones rumored to be as eccentric as Kakashi. The few times Iruka has talked to him, he’s been every bit as strange as the rumor mill says. But kind, always kind in an odd and placid way, like a benevolent predator deciding not to stalk frightened prey. Even when he spent the afternoon telling Iruka to get a grip, already, long before Iruka had decided to take Naruto into his heart, Kakashi had given him that kindness. “I- thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. Can I have my satchel back?” Kakashi stares at him for a long moment, gray eye following the curve of his jaw and taking inventory of him to a point where Iruka feels nearly flayed to the soul by the intensity of his gaze. He cannot possibly imagine what he’s said to warrant the eye-interrogation, but whatever the reasons, he apparently passes, because Kakashi simply turns away and says-

“I’ll carry it back to your apartment for you, sensei. You’re wounded.” And Iruka doesn’t know what else to do but follow him, because Asuma is eyeing him from the corner and he can practically feel a lecture brewing on overtaxing himself post-injury. 

* * *

He doesn’t get more confident about Kakashi after that, considering what Hiruzen tells him about the man’s testing methods, but when Naruto comes home angry, grinning, and beaten to hell all at once after the second day, announcing that he’s passed... Something in Iruka’s chest that he hadn’t even noticed relaxes in a deep sigh of relief. In some ways, it feels like the end of an era. Naruto is no longer his student. He’s his- son. Younger brother. The boy that Iruka will watch grow into a man, season after season, slowly but surely. It is the end of an era, but years later, Iruka will recognize it as just another beginning. 

* * *

**After Kakashi**

* * *

One day, several months of D-rank missions into his life as a genin, Naruto invites him to come watch his genin team practice. According to the boy, who rambles through a mouth of rice and scrambled egg no matter what Iruka tries to get him to stop, Kakashi was going to let them train on their own today. Their sensei had told them yesterday that he had something “more pressing” to do, and Naruto wanted to show Iruka how good he was at using the multi shadow clone jutsu after some time spent honing it at Kakashi’s direction. So Iruka makes lunch (one for him, one for Sakura, one for Sasuke, one for Naruto) and, on a hunch, decides to pack an extra container of miso eggplant into the bag. He doesn’t have any classes to teach today, the term break stretching on for another week, and the weather promises to be beautiful. 

Indeed, it is. There’s something about watching his former students bicker, spar, show off in the carefree way of barely minted genin. It’s relaxing. It makes pride swell in his chest, and now that he’s finally back to 100% after the Mizuki Incident (as Naruto had taken to calling it), he can even enjoy laying back against a tree to observe them. Sasuke is, as predicted, brilliant at most everything he tries. Sakura, however, needs confidence like Iruka needs free Ichiraku meals to keep up with Naruto’s appetite. She’s shy in ways he doesn’t expect, but that makes all the more sense the longer he watches them. It’s just like back in his classroom. She’s strong and he knows it, but she doesn’t really understand it yet, too busy letting herself fit the mold of an infatuated teenage kunoichi. And Naruto is... the same as he always is. Brash, and loud, and overly brave to the point of being foolish. He  _ is _ getting better at kage bunshin, though, and they start to work as a cohesive unit during the spar in more advanced ways than Iruka had expected. 

He’s considering calling them up the hill to eat the bento he’d packed when soft footfalls catch his attention, and Kakashi is dropping himself into a cross legged position beside Iruka in the shade. 

“I hadn’t expected you,” Iruka says mildly, digging around in his bag for that extra container of eggplant and the chopsticks attached to it. Something in him had, a  _ little _ bit, expected Kakashi. But he didn’t really need to explain that to him right now. The other man looks tired, a purple circle standing starkly against his visible eye. There are bruises on his forearms where his sleeves are pushed up, and an angry red slash with stitches through it at the crook of his elbow. 

“I prefer it that way,” Kakashi replies, leaning his head back against the tree and exhaling deeply. It could be insulting. Iruka knows that isn’t how he means it. A man like Kakashi can’t be expected. Routines, beyond the single sentimental one Iruka knows about from his own visitations at the cenotaph, are deadly for someone with that many enemies. They sit in silence for a minute, Iruka’s hand feeling almost frozen on the container in the bag once he finds it. “You watched them. How are they?” He thinks about two things- what Kakashi wants to hear, and what Iruka will tell him. 

“They’re so  _ young _ ,” he finally sighs. “They always are.” 

“You’re not that old yourself, sensei,” Kakashi murmurs, a twinge of amusement in his voice, as he rolls his head to stare at Iruka. The grey of his eye reminds Iruka of a summer storm, waiting on the horizon, roiling with the tension that appears right before electricity splits the sky. Idly, he wonders if anyone had even had to test Kakashi to tell that his chakra type was lightning. Everything about the man screams it. 

“Neither are  _ you _ ,” Iruka counters. “But you know what I meant. They’re doing the best they can from within the borders of Fire Country. When you take them out on the road, when they finally meet other nin, when they realize what the difference is between your kunai meeting their carotid and their kunai meeting yours? They won’t be so young, anymore.” 

“So you think they’re ready, then,” Kakashi says, after a moment. “Hm. Thank you, sensei.” 

“You can just call me Iruka,” he replies, shrugging sore shoulders and finally yanking the eggplant out of the bag. “After all,” he grins, rather self-consciously, holding the container out towards Kakashi. “ _ You _ are teaching  _ them _ , after all. It’s you who earns the title of sensei, here.” 

“I don’t think I’ll ever truly earn the title of sensei,” Kakashi says, taking the eggplant and separating the chopsticks with a grateful nod of his head. “Not, at least, the way you have.” 

“Then I suppose it will be first names, from here on out,” Iruka says, more bravely than he feels, and then he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles for the sparring children (children, children, all three of them, and he aches for a moment over it) to come eat lunch. By the time they get up the hill, Kakashi has already eaten his eggplant. Iruka politely looks away as he does so, to allow him the freedom of taking the mask down for a moment, and by the time he looks back, Kakashi has placed the container back next to Iruka.

“That was good, sensei-” Kakashi says, then stumbles almost imperceptibly over the word. “Iruka. Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome,” he replies calmly. He feels anything but calm. Somehow, there is a razor’s edge, a violin of tense strings between them, even as the three genin fall to the grass and open their bento like ravenous wolves on the hunt. Something has been uncovered. He’s not sure what. “Kakashi.” When Iruka packs the empty eggplant container in his satchel, he catches Sakura looking between them strangely for a moment, before he makes eye contact with her and she blushes furiously, turning back to her meal. 

That night, he asks Naruto how he likes having Kakashi as a teacher, and Naruto, predictably, provides a forty-five minute rant of all the pros and cons he can come up with. But there’s something nagging at Iruka, something that doesn’t go away, even as he lies in bed later that night desperately seeking sleep. Something that Kakashi hadn’t been saying. Something underneath the underneath- in between the in betweens. 

Iruka has always liked a puzzle, but he can’t decide why it is that this one- this man- is so much more compelling than the other puzzles he routinely solves. 

* * *

The puzzle is larger than Iruka thought. 

Kakashi has wound himself deeply into the crevices of Iruka’s life, a winding vine choking up space until he is, suddenly, everywhere. Without much effort, without much care, he and Kakashi are becoming something more, every time Iruka sees him. Like water dripping from an unseen font through the cracks of Iruka’s chest, Kakashi grows- stalactites of glimmering hanging from the roof of his mouth. It hurts until it is fine again, and then it is not, but Iruka still makes an extra side of eggplant for the other man and still invites him to lunch and still sits beside him on the grassy hill. Sometimes, Kakashi appears at the window of his classroom with a question. Deceptively simple queries, things that Iruka is certain he could have discovered elsewhere, but still. Kakashi asks  _ him _ . When Team 7 comes back from all their D-rank missions, they end up in his line in the mission room, handing over crumpled and ramen stained paperwork that has been hastily and obviously salvaged by Sakura. 

He could have almost missed it, their little team becoming more like a family, if not for everything Naruto has babbled out over breakfast and everything Kakashi has almost said during their lunches together. Iruka had been bringing him leftovers after a mission room shift, having filed Kakashi’s A-rank mission earlier and having seen exactly how battered the other man looked. When he arrives at the door, Kakashi invites him into the sparse on-duty apartment. Though Iruka feels a warning tug at the base of his spine, a subtle knowledge that he shouldn’t say yes, he accepts. He doesn’t know why he feels so wary here, like they are teetering on the edge of something entirely unknowable, unfathomable, undefinable.

There are three pictures sitting on Kakashi’s shelf and a single house plant, the only reminders that Kakashi lives here when he’s on call. Iruka knows that Hatake compound is a bit further outside the hustle and bustle of downtown. All at once, he wonders how often Kakashi stays there. How often he wakes up to an empty house. 

It doesn’t matter. 

He tells himself it doesn’t really matter. 

The first picture is of a beautiful brown haired woman with rosy cheeks holding an equally beautiful baby with a single tuft of silver hair and two piercing gray eyes. A man who looks exactly like Kakashi stands at her left shoulder, mouth softened by joy, and cherry blossom petals swirl around them in a dizzying, almost blurry array. From that picture alone, Iruka imagines he could extrapolate Kakashi’s perpetually covered lower face. The next picture is familiar- Yondaime’s face smiles out at them, with the long-gone Uchiha Obito and the beautiful spectre of Nohara Rin bookmarking either end of a blank-faced twelve year old Kakashi. The third picture is the most familiar. It is Kakashi, of course, standing over the heads of three people that look, for a moment, as if they might have been here already in another life. Sakura is smiling brightly, and Kakashi’s curved eye is quite genuine. Naruto grins out from the glass frame like he always does, with the sheer intensity of a burning fire welcoming warriors home, and Sasuke’s mouth betrays him- the smallest quirk of a smile resides there at the edge of his sullen mouth even as he glares sideways at Naruto. Iruka blinks- sees white hair and red lines, snake eyes and golden ponytails, and then- it’s gone again, behind the reflection of his own face in the dimly lit glass. 

Slowly, Kakashi leans himself against the side of the bed, sitting down with an unsettling wheeze, and gestures unsteadily towards the pictures with a bandaged hand. 

“My little art gallery,” he says, something crumbling and old deep in his tone, before he sighs again. “They never complain when I come home late and wake them up.” It should be melancholy, joking about the emptiness of this single room apartment, but Iruka looks at Kakashi’s tired eye and finds himself more amused than anything. There is a fragility to this new space between them, a tension borne of new venues and old expectations. What does he say here that he wouldn’t say out on the training field? What is he allowed to notice here that Kakashi would never let slip in front of Team 7 at dinner?

“Picture-Naruto probably snores a lot less than real Naruto, though,” Iruka offers mildly, setting down the container of food on Kakashi’s kitchenette and leaning back against the counter, mirroring the other man. And Kakashi really does laugh at that, shoulders relaxing slightly and jaw unclenching. He sways a little, faintly, catching himself with one hand on his stomach, and Iruka steps forward before he even thinks about it. “You should lay down,” he says, his instinct to protect clicking into place. “I can leave the food in the fridge for tomorrow morning. Sandaime would kill me if I let you entertain company while you’re in this state- not to mention what your nurses would say.” 

Kakashi waves him off, but he follows Iruka’s advice, getting into bed slowly and melting into the mattress like it’s the first time in weeks that he’s known comfort on his bones. For all Iruka knows about the A-rank he’d just completed, it might as well have been. At a loss for something to do with his hands, Iruka puts the food in the fridge, and fusses over the picture frames, turning them towards Kakashi until they’re perfectly lined up again, a little row of families watching over his slumber in the night. 

“It’s nice to have precious people to come home to,” Iruka says, almost without meaning to, before he can bite his tongue. “Even if they’re only here as you remember them.” He regrets saying it immediately- too forward. Rude. Though Iruka enjoys coming home to pictures of his family and friends, enjoys thinking about those who he misses and those who are still around to come back to, there’s no telling whether Kakashi does. Not after the unfathomable layers of trauma he’s been through, compared to Iruka. There is a long, uncomfortable silence, but as he’s turning to leave, Kakashi calls out to him with a voice already heavy and honeyed by sleep. 

“Thank you, sensei,” he murmurs, and Iruka nearly trips putting his sandals back on. 

“It’s no problem,” he replies, cheeks flushing suddenly, hands twisting in the straps of his satchel. “And like I said before, you don’t need to call me sensei.” 

“How can I not?” Kakashi slurs, his one visible eye blinking shut and staying there. “When you have so much left to teach me?”

But before Iruka can reply to that bewildering statement, Kakashi is fully asleep. Iruka stands there for what seems like a millennia, though it was likely only two or three minutes. There is a hole in his gut where Kakashi’s words punched through it, through walls and walls of pragmatism and carefully guarded feelings. He snaps himself out of it when he remembers that he’s in a sleeping jounin’s commissioned apartment and there are likely to be traps that he cannot possibly disarm. On the walk home, the moon shines brightly above him, and for once, the night does not seem so cold.

* * *

He doesn’t mean to overhear them talking. A lot of people forget he’s there, when they’re gossiping. He’s inherently trustworthy. People give him their back for a multitude of reasons. They respect him, because he’s been entrusted with the care and wellbeing of the village’s future by Sandaime. Or they trust him because many of the jounin in the classes directly preceding his are relaxed around him. Or, quite frankly, they trust that they could kill someone they regard as soft, emotional, and weak. He allows the latter to assume what they will, and gratefully takes the trust of the others, especially all of the jounin and current ANBU that are willing to bare their throats to him in times of war. Most of them don’t realize that he can recognize them by their chakra signatures alone with his chakra location. He’ll keep it that way as long as he can. This time, it’s Genma and Raido that forget he’s got good ears (ears enhanced by chakra to catch troublemakers in his classroom when he’s writing on the board) while they’re standing in the corner of the nearly deserted mission room at 8 pm on a Thursday night. 

“The old man can’t keep working him like this,” Genma mutters, rolling his senbon between his lips and leaning sullenly against the wall. “This last mission… If he doesn’t get put back on single duty with just his genin team soon, we won’t have to guess whether or not he steps in front of those swords on purpose.” 

“You don’t think he would?” Raido says slowly, in a voice that is caught between being accusing and distraught. “You’ve seen him with that team. He even answered a  _ question _ you asked him about them, last weekend.” Raido glances back at the desk, where Iruka is trying very hard to look as though he’s reading a C-rank mission report some chunin had turned in half an hour ago. He must do a good enough job, because the taller man slides shaky, tired fingers through his hair and turns back to Genma again with a look of unhappiness souring his handsome face. 

“All I’m saying is, there’s a bit of a precedent for premature death in that clan,” Genma replies. “But you know that if we say anything, Sandaime… It would have to be someone he trusts, is all. You know, someone with a shred more emotional intelligence than your average ANBU, but someone who still knows the guy. The village is desperate, and these days I’m starting to wonder if we’re really desperate enough to trade the future of an entire clan for a basic fucking A-rank.” Iruka doesn’t miss the way that both of them turn to look at him once Genma is done speaking, before they push off the wall and make their way to the door. He has a sinking feeling in his stomach, the type of ugly recognition as his brain clicks things together. 

There is only one person that he knows of working ANBU and S-rank missions that has a genin team and was recently on a mission. Oh, Iruka doesn’t know for  _ sure _ , exactly. But he knows Genma and Raido speak about working with Kakashi. He knows Kakashi had been badly hurt by this last mission, and that he’s pulling double duty as an on-call S-rank and as a jounin sensei. He knows about the precedent for premature death in the Hatake clan, and that Kakashi is the only person left to perpetuate it. Iruka closes the mission desk early that night and goes home to eat late dinner with Naruto and listen to him talk about how Kakashi had made them practice walking on water until he and Sasuke had nearly drowned. 

“Sakura got it right on the first try,” Naruto says sullenly, and Iruka struggles to prevent his own laughter. 

“Maybe you should ask her to give you some pointers,” he points out, gathering up their dishes and putting them in the sink. “It might give her a favorable impression of your work ethic, Naruto.” He can practically hear the cogs turning in the boy’s head, the lightbulb slowly lighting, and then Naruto leaps from the table with a whoop of joy. 

“You’re right, Iruka-nii! Maybe I can even ask her to give me some tutoring, you know, one-on-one,” Naruto babbles, sweeping his stuff into his bag off the table before running back to his room with it, a shout of thanks echoing down the hallway before the door is slammed shut, probably so he can plot out his next move. 

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. He’s seen the way Sakura looks at Sasuke, these days. It’s not the kind of thing that goes away with a little time, either. One day, Naruto will realize how much Sakura loves him- the kind of love that outlasts time and death and everything in between. They would kill for each other, he’s confident of that, but he also knows that Naruto is too young to realize that he can have everything he wants, yet. And one day, Naruto will find out that his rivalry with Sasuke isn’t what he thinks it is either. The same way that soon, Sasuke will have to reckon with the other two loving him deeply and unwaveringly in a manner he is far too shut off and uncomfortable to acknowledge now. Kakashi probably sees it too. Team 7 has been coalescing into the type of fiery, lifelong triad that is surprisingly common among shinobi of their caliber. He’s actually rather glad that they’re still too young to really grasp that, because he doesn’t want to go over sex-ed again with them, and he knows Kakashi would make that conversation absolutely miserable for everyone involved. 

He thinks about Team 7 long into the night- about the way that Sakura carefully prepares bento for them most days in little boxes that have enameled cherry blossoms on the lids. About the way that Kakashi watches them from the trees, forty minutes late to their training session but unwilling to break into the comfortable silence as the three of them rest for what may be the last time in their lives (always, always, always taking that last opportunity because shinobi cannot leave loose ends and cannot assume the luxury of another sunrise). About the fact that now Sasuke actually comes to eat dinner at Ichiraku with them on occasion, and he claims to hate Naruto but Iruka knows he waited outside the hospital last time Naruto got a concussion on some stupid D-rank mission until he saw the boy walking back out again with a bandaged skull. About the wholeheartedness of Sakura’s determination to protect them, even though Iruka knows- he knows deeply in his heart- that she will never be ready to kill until it’s past time and she’s already done it. He thinks about her civilian parents and how someone will have to remind her that a Leaf shinobi protects the will of fire, and sometimes protecting your village means killing the children of another. When the moon is high in the sky, Iruka thinks of the sweet curve of Naruto’s grin like a sunflower blooming in fallow fields, bold and bright and surviving. This boy who he has come to call precious, who he is going to send away, out in the world, out into wars that he is too young to fight. 

Maybe Kakashi is fading away from the stress that Sandaime is saddling him with, and maybe Iruka is selfish for thinking it, but in that moment he is glad that Kakashi was the one Sandaime gave Naruto to. Kakashi will not sugar-coat the world for Naruto, and he will not pretend that enemies aren’t ready to slit your throat and eat your heart right out of your chest with sharpened teeth. Kakashi knows death like the back of his hand, and though some in the village still whisper his name with disdain (Cold-Blooded Kakashi, Friend-Killer, child of the traitorous White Fang), Iruka has seen the writing on the wall. 

Team 7 is already precious to Kakashi, and nothing is going to change that now. Iruka just has to make sure that Kakashi’s alive long enough to recognize that fact himself. 

* * *

It feels a bit foolish, but Iruka starts inviting Kakashi and the rest of Team 7 to dinner every night. He knows that Sasuke doesn’t have anywhere else to be, and that Sakura is beginning to chafe under the weight of her parents’ expectations that she carry on with normal family obligations in the civilian markets as well as keeping up with the heavy burden of genin training. Like most shinobi from civilian families, she will have to part from her parents soon in order to preserve their relationship. The incompatibility of the way her parents perceive their daughter and the reality of her growing calluses inside and out make home life harder and harder, so she starts studying at the kitchen table after dinner most nights, at least comfortable in the knowledge that her parents hold some affection for Iruka from her years at the academy. And of course, Iruka knows Naruto will take any opportunity to bask in the combined love and happiness of comrades that he is beginning to truly trust with his life. 

He hopes, with all of that on the table, that Kakashi will join them often as well.

It is easier than it has any right to be, settling down at the kitchen table with whatever meal he’d managed to cobble together through his clumsiness. Sakura often helps him, and Sasuke is particularly deft at preparing vegetables, but Kakashi is the real surprise. The ace of the team, as it were, when he gently bumps Iruka aside with a hip to take over frying the fish on the grill and Iruka realizes that his hands are just as practiced with a pair of cooking chopsticks as they are with a shuriken. Kakashi is frequently late, almost always has something to say to rile the kids up, and often has to disappear during the meal when a sparrow summon arrives with a mission scroll for him. He is usually mostly quiet, brings his Icha Icha books out at the table, and occasionally tracks immense amounts of mud into Iruka’s home. 

Despite all of that, Iruka finds himself enamored with the masked jounin, more and more so every time he appears and puts his beaten up shinobi sandals next to Naruto’s on Iruka’s genkan. And, the more their shared dinners coalesce as a successful team building initiative, the more Iruka is certain that something is going to have to happen to Kakashi’s workload. Whenever the other man cracks up a tiny bit, whenever he lets something more slip, whenever he starts to relax in the kitchen while waiting for food to cook, Iruka can see it. The bone-deep tiredness that is stalking the other shinobi like a demon, just waiting for him to make one mis-step and fall into the arms of a thousand grinning wolves. 

* * *

“You’re the only one that’s seen it come out, since the sealing,” Kakashi tells him, a few days before Naruto and his team are due to set out on their first mission out of Fire country. “So what happened, exactly, in the forest that night?” 

“What?” Iruka asks distractedly, scribbling on a student’s paper. “The world eater, you mean? Kurama?”

“Kurama?” Kakashi asks, the barest hint of surprise evident in his tone. 

“That’s what Naruto told me its name is,” Iruka shrugs, looking up at the other man through fallen strands of messy hair. Getting all of the grades in for the end of the term was his waking nightmare, currently. “He had a dream, the week after everything with Mizuki happened. I’m not sure if he named it that unconsciously, or if the Kyuubi told him to call it that itself.” 

“Hm,” Kakashi hums, fiddling with a kunai as he re-wraps the handle with new linen. “I don’t think it ever spoke to Kushina that way.” Iruka drops his pen, smearing a line across the paper he’s been grading. 

“You knew the person who had the nine tails before this?” Iruka asks faintly. Kakashi simply nods.

“I know a lot of people,” he says, like the cryptic asshole he can so often be. “Tell me what happened in the forest that night.” Iruka knows that he’s not going to get anything else out of Kakashi, if that’s the way he wants to be. God help the poor soul that tries to get information out of a determined ANBU, whether they’re exhausted or not. 

“What I remember,” Iruka says slowly, “is how bright and red the chakra was. I’d never seen anything like it, not really- even when the Kyuubi attacked the village, it was darker than this. More fully formed, I guess. This was almost… like staring directly into the hottest part of a fire. Just raw chakra, leaking out of him from every pore. It came out when Mizuki was about to kill me, and Naruto stood between us. For a moment, before he actually attacked Mizuki, I thought I could see the tails and the ears of the world-eater there in his chakra, like the butterflies you see in an Akimichi’s chakra during battle.”

“Was he in control of it?” Kakashi’s visible eye is piercing, and though his tone is friendly and calm, Iruka can see the tense muscles in his shoulders. 

“He spoke with his own voice,” Iruka confirms. “Not Kurama’s. I think, in some way, they are approaching a compromise. But I don’t think he can tap into the chakra yet, not really. My hunch is that only when his emotions grow strong enough for the Kyuubi to take notice will it start to bubble up.” Kakashi sits with the information for a second, and then stands, his wince at the movement barely noticeable. 

“Thanks for the information, sensei. I’ve got a letter to send.” 

Iruka watches him leave with a shadowed expression and decides, in that moment, that he has a letter of his own that needs to be getting on its way. He pulls a blank piece of paper out of his satchel and rests it on a book, pen clicking between his fingers as he makes the words as neat as possible. 

_ Honorable Sandaime- I may be overstepping my boundaries, but…. _

* * *

Iruka is only mildly surprised that Hiruzen doesn’t hit him on sight when he is summoned to the Hokage tower two days later. Ibiki Morino, head of Torture and Interrogation, stands beside the Hokage’s desk, and Asuma is standing in front of it. 

“You really do have the most  _ massive _ balls,” Asuma murmurs to Iruka when he joins him at attention, and Hiruzen shifts a reproachful gaze to his son for a brief moment before looking back to the (barely not-shaking) Iruka. He hasn’t felt this scared of Hiruzen since the first time the man found him at the cenotaph, crying over the aching wound where his parents’ love had been. 

“So,” Hiruzen says, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together. “You think you know Hatake Kakashi, Iruka-sensei.” 

“Not really,” Iruka manages to say, finding his voice again as he remembers the way Kakashi had fallen asleep with the eyes of lost loved ones staring blankly through empty moonlight at him in that cold apartment. “I cannot pretend to truly know him, Hokage-sama. But I have spent increasing amounts of time with him these past few months as Naruto- as my  _ son _ ,” He adds hastily, “has become his student. And it has come to my attention that he is currently assigned to double duty- both obtaining and completing A and S-rank missions, and serving as a jounin sensei.” He swallows thickly, waiting for Hiruzen to give him any sign, but the old man just crooks an eyebrow and waves at him to continue. 

“While I would never speak in doubt of the ability of a ninja of Hatake-san’s caliber and importance to the village, I cannot help but fear that if I, a chunin sensei, am noticing that he appears overworked and poorly rested, then those outside the village will notice as well. And though in some ways, my concern for his genin team supersedes my other motives, I also wrote to you as someone who feels concern for one of the greatest assets to our will of fire.” 

“You think he’s approaching a breaking point,” Asuma says, humming in assent as he leans back a little on his heels. Iruka thanks him silently, begging himself to not shake under Ibiki’s increasingly dark stare, resting on him like an iron weight. 

“Or, perhaps,” Iruka says thickly, “he is approaching a grave mistake. I know he is the last Hatake, Hokage-sama, and one of the few lightning users we have in Konoha. If he continues to be pushed to his absolute limits…. There is no guarantee of a happy future for any shinobi, this I know. But the chances of any future that might benefit our village will be slim to none if this is the path Konoha sends Hatake-san down.”

“You think the short-term benefit of sending our single best jounin on S-ranks for the village is outweighed by the long-term benefit of having him mentor some barely average snot-nosed genin?” Ibiki asks him with a voice like barbed wire, dragging sharp lacerations through Iruka’s chest. It feels like a noose around his neck when he goes to speak again, and he has to take a deep breath. Good  _ gods _ , he thinks to himself. Ibiki radiates killing intent even when he’s calm. Perhaps that’s part of why he’s so good at his job, though, and to be fair to Ibiki- this very well  _ could _ be an interrogation. Iruka just might not know it yet. 

“I think,” Iruka answers, more steadily than he has any right to, “that if he continues to be spread between training his genin and performing other missions for the village, he will, inevitably,  _ pardon my language _ \- fuck one of the two up. And it is my opinion, as someone who taught his genin for the preceding three years before he received them as a team, that ignoring their training would be the worst mistake Konoha could possibly make. Haruno Sakura had top theory grades in the Academy, near perfect practicum scores, and chakra control unlike anything I’ve ever seen at that age. She achieved all of that with a civilian family background, as well. Uchiha Sasuke is the single remaining born Sharingan user in this village, and was also among the top of his genin class in most skills. There are, of course,” he glances at Asuma, making eye contact for a brief moment as the other man nods, “other obvious reasons why Hatake-san must be the one to teach him. And though Naruto is, regrettably, still as brash as ever, he does contain the most powerful tailed beast we have ever seen. A tailed beast that I know grows closer to the surface the more he trains. Without any of the Sannin remaining in the village, I cannot imagine another teacher that would be able to both mold Naruto into the force he promises to be, and contain the disaster should one arise.” 

Hiruzen hums, nodding his head once, and leans forward again, unlacing his fingers to pick up a stamp. When he opens the folder on his desk, Iruka can see that it’s filled with red papers, the kind that hold remote-destruction seals. ANBU files. 

“Asuma was right, you know,” Hiruzen murmurs, inking the stamp and pressing it to the top paper with an air of finality, just over the characters that spell out Kakashi’s name. The black letters left behind shimmer for a brief moment before going pale and slowly fading away.  _ Temporarily Decommissioned _ . The old man slams the file shut and hands it to Ibiki, who takes it with a grim smile. Iruka gets the feeling that he hadn’t, actually, been all that upset about what Iruka had come to do. Another test. Another mindgame. What else could he expect from T&I, though? “You do have an enormous boldness to you, don’t you, Iruka-kun?” 

“Sir,” Iruka says, nodding, and then Asuma laughs heartily and claps him on the back. 

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again,” the other man grins, grabbing the nape of Iruka’s neck in a brotherly squeeze. “Hopeless cases, Iruka.” 

“There will be a mission for you soon, I think,” the Hokage says, as Iruka is turning to leave. “And though I know your instinct is to be humble about such things, Iruka, I would ask you to consider it thoroughly when it is offered.” 

“Yes, Hokage-sama.” Sandaime is right. Iruka’s first instinct usually  _ is _ to turn down missions. He feels confident in his ability to teach, to mold the village’s future. He feels like he’s making a difference when he watches a student’s eyes light up in understanding, or welcomes a shinobi home from a particularly difficult mission from his post at the mission desk. But if the Hokage himself is mentioning this mission, then Iruka must consider it more thoroughly than the usual C-ranks and guard duties that other people ask him to take. When Konoha asks something seriously of her children, her children must answer seriously as well. 

That, of course, is the will of fire. And the will of fire is Iruka’s shinobi way.

* * *

Later that day, at the market, a gaggle of older women stop him by the fruit stand. 

“I hope he’s treating you right, sensei,” one of them tells him, reaching up to wag a finger in his face, and Iruka spares a moment to be utterly confused. 

“I’m very sorry, Miyoko-san,” he says, shifting his grocery bags to his other arm and leaning back a little from her accusatory digit. “But I’m not sure what you mean?”

“That Hatake brat,” another one huffs. “He’d better be treating you right, Iruka-kun.” 

“He’s very kind to Team 7,” Iruka assures them, watching them titter amongst themselves. “He’s been nothing but polite.” Which is not entirely true, because there’s little politesse to be found in reading bodice-ripper porn at the table, or allowing Sasuke and Naruto to get into another teen dick-measuring contest in Iruka’s living room. But to him, at least, Kakashi has been nothing but kind. It’s a problem, truly, because Iruka is beginning to suspect that he’ll be enamored of the special jounin for a lifetime if this behavior keeps up, and they have much more pressing matters to bother with right now. 

“Good, I’m sure he is,” Haru pats his arm, winking conspiratorially, and they let him go, leaving him to wonder what, exactly, that was all about on his walk home. Kakashi is standing in his kitchen when he gets there, instructing Sakura on how best to skin a fish to grill it over an open flame out on the road and using the smallest katon jutsu Iruka has ever seen to light his stove. He forgets the women and their meddling until he’s getting ready for bed later, cheeks still flushed from laughing at some terrible joke the jounin told while the kids were falling asleep on the sofa and he was putting his shoes on to leave. 

It is a feeling so sweet that his teeth ache in his jaw. 

He dreams of Kakashi that night, things he would never admit to another person, things that wake him up flushed and sweating under his light blanket. The house to themselves, drinking sake, laughing over more terrible jokes. He dreams of a bold version of himself that might make good on the sarcastic, flirtatious jokes that Kakashi is prone to making. The bold Iruka crawls on the living room floor, pins Kakashi in place with a stern look and firm hands on his hips, yanks his pants down. The bold Iruka sucks his cock and lets him yank on hair freed from its usual hair tie and hears the rare, beautiful sound of Hatake Kakashi begging for something. Kakashi looks so good under him, hair mussed, face freed, flushed down to his navel and pleading for Iruka to move faster on top of him. It’s heady, powerful, vivid enough that Iruka wakes with his hips pressed to the mattress and has to push his mouth to his pillow to stop his own involuntary moan. 

“You’re killing me here, Hatake,” he mutters, shoving a hand into his boxers and jerking off like a teenager, reaching out for someone impossible that he knows he’ll have to look in the eye tomorrow. But try as he might to rationalize it, it feels right to come with that name on his tongue, teeth digging into his bottom lip hard enough that he draws blood. Thankfully, blessedly, he doesn’t dream again when he finally falls asleep to the faint buzz of the sodium street lamps outside his window, boneless and lax from his orgasm. 

* * *

Iruka puts extra snacks for Naruto in his mission pack, sealing them in a scroll that Naruto will only be able to undo if he’s paid enough attention to what Iruka has been teaching him on the side at home these past few months. He figures that some limited edition ramen Chouza had shared with him in exchange for teaching Chouji how to properly make exploding tags (Team Ino-Shika-Cho may be extraordinary parents, but not everyone has the patience or the down-time to sit through the six hours of work it takes to get a new genin past the “might blow themselves up” stage) will be enough to motivate the boy. At the gate, Sakura and Sasuke are already on guard, their determination to do a good job propelling them forward with a stony expression and a deceptively sweet smile respectively. Kakashi leans against the village wall, chatting with Izumo and Kotetsu, while the man who must be their client rifles through his sack, checking last minute that everything is there. When Naruto bounds ahead to sling an arm around Sasuke’s neck (and receive a punch to the head for his trouble) Kakashi looks up, his eye meeting Iruka’s with no effort at all. He waves nonchalantly, but the difference in his body language when he says goodbye to Izumo and Kotetsu is obvious. He looks well rested, for once. 

“Come back to your precious people,” Iruka tells the genin, looking at each of them with a well of pride glowing deep in his stomach. Kakashi’s smile is evident, even below the mask, when Iruka looks up at him last. For a moment, Iruka’s chest refuses to expand, his breath caught in between his ribs like cold honey as he is struck by the realization that he hasn’t actually seen a  _ real _ smile from Kakashi in all these months. The genin are already chattering, promising him they’ll come home safe and turning to make their way out of the village with their client, by the time Iruka breathes easily once more. And Kakashi is there, handsome as ever, with that grey gaze that seems to see directly through him with no effort at all.

“Don’t worry, Iruka,” Kakashi says, flipping him a jaunty two fingered salute. “ _ Your son is very strong _ .” 

Iruka watches the five of them leave the safety of Konoha behind, disappearing off into the trees on a sunny morning that, for all intents and purposes, is just like any other. They are just like any other genin team, setting off on a mission with their jounin-sensei, learning the ropes of the shinobi world. But in other ways, they are nothing like that at all- a boy who holds the world-eater, two clan orphans, and a civilian girl determined to protect her village at all costs. They are a precious little family, and Iruka hopes and prays to any gods that might be listening that they remain so, and make it back to him safely. 

It is not until later, much later, when he is eating dinner alone in a startlingly quiet apartment, that he realizes something else. 

“ _ Your son is very strong _ ,” Kakashi had said. 

Where had he heard that sentence before, in a different context? Before Kakashi was their jounin-sensei, before Naruto was even really his to call a son, before the paperwork had been stamped…. A man in the forest with a porcelain mask had told Iruka that very same thing, in that very same reassuring tone of voice, pitched just a little bit lower. Inu, the ANBU that had taken him to the hospital after Naruto beat Mizuki- oh.

Oh. 

_ Oh _ .

Iruka can’t do anything but laugh helplessly, his near-hysterical tears echoing around the empty apartment. He supposed he didn’t really have as much to worry about anymore, did he? Team 7 had been running with the ANBU’s most feared weapon this entire time. 


	2. Broken Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Konoha calls her children. Iruka answers.

Though Iruka doesn’t remember a lot about his own chunin exams (mostly just the intense anxiety and adrenaline of it all, and the sick feeling of his knife sliding through flesh and bone) he is certain it did not go as poorly as Team 7’s does. As the legal kin of one of the contestants, and the currently recognized guardian, he receives a short note from the exam proctors shortly after the second stage of the exam is completed, detailing out the fact that the exam had not “gone as anticipated” and that there would be a high likelihood that his child “would be taken directly to the village hospital, instead of returning home immediately as planned.” 

He leaves his class with Suzume that afternoon, less than five minutes after getting the message, and is at the hospital in less than ten. It is, in many ways, a devastation. Sasuke is in a hospital bed, unlikely to recover quickly, and Kakashi paces the hallway like a caged wolf, waiting for someone to give him an excuse to draw blood. Iruka can hear whispering about curse marks from two medi-nin. Sakura wakes up with shorter hair than she’s had since she was a small child, and Iruka can’t watch her look at herself in the mirror for fear it will break something vital within him. She cries on Naruto’s shoulder while Naruto promises himself to her in words far too old for his age. Iruka turns away from them in the last vestiges of their childhood grief, unable to piece either of them back together and unwilling to invade their tender privacy. But Kakashi was right- his son is strong. His son is very strong, and Kakashi is part of the reason why. 

Everything they’ve argued over, bled over, trained the kids to do these past months is on Kakashi. And he’s grateful for that, for knowing that Kakashi doesn’t break his promises, and he promised to take care of Team 7 for Iruka. There is a tension between them that he cannot entirely dispel, nor can he understand. The smile Kakashi gave him before Team 7 registered for the exams is gone. Iruka misses it terribly, even as he relishes in the way that Kakashi leans close to him while they sit in the hospital rooms, or hands him a cup of tea just when his throat is getting dry again. The world in which Iruka dreamed of him seems so far away, but when their fingers brush, he’s reminded of it, the deep want simmering within him, no matter how they argue or where they sit in silent vigil. On the third day of that silence, while Iruka is visiting his other former students in the upstairs ward again, he asks Iruka to bring a crumpled up letter to the Hokage. There is something vaguely desperate in Kakashi’s eye, that familiar exhaustion evident in the set of his jaw. 

Iruka takes the letter. It is faintly damp, crumpled, and in an envelope with a seal that almost looks like a toad from one angle on the front. Iruka pretends not to see the Hokage’s shocked face when he reads it later that afternoon, and takes a deep breath for every step of his way home. Despite his best efforts, there is a knot coiling deep in his gut and it gets tighter every day, until Iruka is worried it might twist him apart in his sleep. 

* * *

“I found someone that I think will be able to help Sasuke and train Naruto,” Kakashi tells him in passing when they run into each other at the market. It’s been ten days since their last team dinner, right before the Chunin Exams started. They had fought, publically, over whether or not Team 7 was ready. They had argued, bitter words, and then made up, mostly silently, on the roof of an apartment building. Iruka finds himself missing the curve of Kakashi’s smile under his mask, and the gentle weight of a hand on his shoulder. “But they’re going to have to leave the village with me.” 

The knot in Iruka’s stomach gets bigger, filling up space like it might choke him alive. He tries not to miss Kakashi so much in that moment, because the dizzy ringing in his skull makes him wonder if Kakashi is going to be the one to take Naruto away from him for good. 

* * *

“I hate Ebisu-sensei,” Naruto mutters, when he comes home the next evening. Iruka has to laugh a little- even people he hates get respectful titles now, because he knows that it’s not worth getting another lecture on respecting his teachers from Iruka. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to make a decently polite human out of Naruto one day. It may take decades, he decides, watching Naruto throw his bag down and stomp around the living room, swearing under his breath. 

“You won’t have to work with him much longer,” Iruka offers, putting bowls of rice down on the dinner table. “I promise, Naruto, Kakashi-sensei is coming up with an excellent training plan for you and Sasuke.” 

“That bastard isn’t even out of the hospital yet,” Naruto grumbles, but his shoulders relax, and he eats his dinner without complaint. Naruto doesn’t know that Kakashi had foiled an intruder’s attempt at getting to Sasuke under ANBU guard. He doesn’t know that Pakkun had come to get Iruka when Sakura fell asleep in the library for the second time this week, burning the candle at both ends reading book after book about curse marks and arcane seals. Naruto doesn’t know how much Iruka has cried this past week. 

It’s going to be hard letting him go. 

* * *

Asuma finds him in his classroom early the next morning, standing in the doorway and watching Iruka mock up the lesson on trap setting that he’s going to give his pre-genin today. It’s the smell of cigarettes and the crackling chakra that has always reminded Iruka of wind blowing through a campfire that gives his presence away. 

“Got a message for you,” he says, brandishing a scroll as he steps into Iruka’s domain, full of chalk dust and the cool smell of the early morning. 

“You can leave it on the desk,” Iruka manages to say, past that ever-present knot in his belly. “I’m sure you’ve got genin to train, right? Shikamaru is going to be in the finals, isn’t he?”

“I’ve got something more urgent to take care of right now,” Asuma replies, tapping the scroll against Iruka’s chalkboard like a pointer as he steps closer. “Read the scroll, Ru.” Reluctantly, under Asuma’s heavy gaze, Iruka opens the scroll. He opens it, despite everything that is welling up inside of him telling him not to. It’s going to be something about Naruto, of that he is certain. Probably another parent’s message, just something to let him know once more that there’s nothing he can do to protect the boy he has made his kin. Something horrible that only Asuma could deliver to him, by order of the Hokage. 

Instead, he finds a mission, classed S-Rank. Deliverable only by hand by an S-Class jounin. Feeling like he might be underwater, he performs the hand signs to unscramble the ink, watching as the words slowly coalesce into the Hokage’s familiar handwriting on the parchment paper. He remembers, in the back of his mind, the meeting in which the Hokage told him a mission would be coming soon. It seems like it was a lifetime ago. Iruka can feel his heart begin to race.

**Mission Contracted To** : Umino Iruka. 

**Commanding Officer** : Hatake Kakashi.

**Mission Length** : Undefined. 

**Priority Level** : S-level. Academy classes to be reassigned until further notice. Please provide curriculum plans to the Academy head before departure. 

**Primary Objective** : Assist Jounin-command Hatake Kakashi on a serve and protect mission escorting the Konoha genin Haruno Sakura, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uzumaki Naruto to [redacted] destination. Make contact with and observe contact, [redacted]. Provide mission assistance. Mission may continue beyond return to Konoha, potentially indefinitely beyond the concluding phase of the inter-village Chunin Exams. Mission length to be defined at discretion of jounin-command. 

**Secondary Objective** : Utilize substantial fuinjutsu knowledge to assist in the training of Haruno Sakura. 

“What the  _ fuck _ ?” Iruka says, a little hollowly, and Asuma laughs at him. It’s a kind laugh, the laugh he remembers from when they were little, but it’s enough to bring red heat to his cheeks. “I can’t-  _ what _ ?”

“Remember what the old man said,” Asuma grins at him, a little melancholy around the eyes. “Konoha calls her children, Iruka-sensei.” 

“And her children answer,” Iruka agrees faintly, setting the scroll down on the desk and watching the words scramble themselves once more, as soon as his hand leaves the paper. 

“Better get those lesson plans going,” Asuma gives him a casual wave, like he hadn’t just handed Iruka a bomb and watched it go off. And then Iruka is alone in his classroom with curriculum books strewn across his desk, watching his world slowly reassemble itself in a completely new way. 

* * *

Anko, ever grateful to get out of the on-duty barrack accommodations, agrees easily to watch over Iruka’s apartment. Iruka’s neighbor agrees to put the mail in when Anko is on short missions, and can’t get it. Suzume gets all of the lesson plans for Iruka’s substitute, starting tomorrow, and by four pm Iruka has packed up his entire life in such a way that he can follow Naruto out of the village gates without worrying about coming back to complete chaos. He has a scroll full of inks, papers, chakra glue, strings and anything else he might need to teach Sakura about seals. He has another two scrolls full of food that he knows will come in handy as a motivator later down the road. His wallet is full of whatever easily available cash he could get out of his account, sealed to his chakra signature, and he’s got about three extra pairs of clothes in the last scroll. Every bit of his field equipment is packed into his backpack. Sliding it on feels like coming back to another life he once had. In a way, it sort of is. It’s been a long time since he was on a mission that wasn’t easily defined as “make sure the village’s children grow up well” or “make sure you don’t file classified information the wrong way” or “protect someone”. In a way, this mission encompasses all three of those ideas. 

When he arrives at the gates with Naruto and Sakura in tow, both of them appearing substantially more nervous than he’s ever seen them, Kakashi is waiting with Sasuke at his side. The boy looks fragile, somehow, like a porcelain doll balancing precariously on the edge of the mantle in a house full of rambunctious children. He doesn’t look at them as they arrive. 

“We’ll speak on the road,” Kakashi says directly to Iruka, nodding at Sakura and Naruto with an uncharacteristically gentle look in his eye. “Let’s go. I want to reach a camping site by the first star, and set up by nightfall. It will take us two days to reach the rendezvous location.” 

“Where are we going?” Naruto asks him, eyes shuttered and heavy with a responsibility that makes Iruka’s heart ache wildly. 

“You’ll find out when we get there,” Kakashi says, and he turns away from the Hokage monument, shouldering his pack firmly and pressing one hand to Sasuke’s upper back, urging him forward. “For now, it’s time we go.” 

* * *

At the first place they stop, a hidden campsite Kakashi leads them to just as dusk begins to fall, Iruka puts his teacher face on and pulls Sakura aside to ward their campsite for the night. He figures that Kakashi can pull together dinner with Naruto and Sasuke (somehow) and that later, when the kids have gone to sleep, they’ll talk. That, and the oppressive silence of Sasuke’s current angsty disdain for both his sensei and his teammates is starting to get on Iruka’s nerves, so he’ll take any excuse to bail out of its range. Likely, said disdain will consume Naruto enough that he doesn’t even realize Iruka and Sakura had been doing something else this whole time.

“It’s almost like combining a genjutsu and a paper bomb,” he explains, “but for the future. Whatever the intruder does has to trigger it, you see? So you tag the wood of the trees with this seal, and when they trip it with their chakra signature, it throws them into a genjutsu and sends an alarm to your chakra as well.” 

“Like a spiderweb signaling prey,” Sakura says, her eyes gleaming with understanding. He always did like teaching her, how fast she picked things up, how determined she was to know everything inside and out. There’s something about her hunger for knowledge that reminds him of himself, in a way- overlooked by the others, less powerful in all the ways that outwardly count for popularity’s sake in a world consumed by war. But in there, he knows, under all the fatuous teenage emotion, there’s a genius brain. And a temper, of course, and an appetite for pranks that Iruka knows she doesn’t think he’s noticed. He briefly considers how terrifying a team with her, Shikamaru, and Shino could have been. 

“Exactly,” he agrees, guiding her hand to follow his in marking the chakra ink to the bark. “There are more like it, I’ll show you them along the way. Lord Hokage requested I teach you more fuinjutsu while we’re on the road, even though you won’t be taking the final trials this round of the chunin exams.” When her face falls slightly, he reaches out, tapping her shoulder gently with a comforting hand. “Don’t forget that you knocked out the heiress to one of the great clans, Sakura-chan,” he reminds her, and warmth sprouts in his chest at the determined set of her jaw. “I didn’t make chunin until I was sixteen. You have more than enough time.” 

“Thanks, sensei,” she says gratefully, and when she pulls her brush away, there is a near-perfect replica of his seal shining briefly on the tree. Later, Kakashi will check her seals, and be almost unable to tell the difference between hers and Iruka’s. 

“I think, perhaps, it was a mistake for everyone to underestimate her,” he says, returning to the fire where Iruka watches over the sleeping genin. 

“It’s hard to see a candle lit next to a bonfire,” Iruka agrees. “And though I wish she’d had more of a chance to shine before now, you have to give it to her. Without her, I’m almost certain they would have killed each other by now.” 

“She might kill them first,” Kakashi says, a nostalgic look on what small portion of his face Iruka can see. They sit in silence for a while, flickering sparks flitting up into the dark of the night and dying out in the span of a breath, right before Iruka’s eyes. Once Naruto begins to snore, Kakashi makes a series of ten seals, almost too fast for Iruka to catch, and a circle glows around the two of them, muffling the sounds of the night. Iruka waits for him to speak. It doesn’t take long. 

“What,” he says slowly, measuredly, taking in Iruka with the gaze of a wolf contemplating its prey, “do you know of the sannin, sensei?”

“Tsunade’s on sanctioned leave from the village, has been for nigh on twelve years. No one knows why, or how, but the Third won’t hear a word about bringing her back. There’s a Jiraiya sighting every once in a while, just him making the usual trouble or showing up at civilian writing conferences, and everything the village has on him says that he’s been dutifully taking out whatever missing nin he comes across, like a true shinobi of the leaf. That’s why the Third lets him continue to roam, instead of coming back to Konoha. And Orochimaru...” Iruka swallows the name like poison on his tongue. “He’s a ghost in the wind, as far as any of our public documents go. Hasn’t been a confirmed sighting since he defected.”

“Well,” Kakashi scratches at his jaw, his eye wandering from Iruka’s face finally. “You’re two-thirds of the way there, sensei. Tsunade’s leave is sanctioned, Jiraiya is making his own way. But Orochimaru, unfortunately, has decided to surface from whatever hole he’s been doing his sick experiments in now. You know Anko fairly well, don’t you, sensei? So I’m sure you know about the circumstances leading to her ending up on your team, all those years ago.” 

“No,” Iruka says, more out of the creeping numb horror that’s crawling up his spine than anything. “You’re not saying- he’s looking for another apprentice?”

“Not exactly,” Kakashi shrugs. On his face, there’s the expression of a man haunted by his own limitations- a teacher held back from his students at the time when they need his guidance the most. “The mark on Anko, the one they had to seal before she could run missions with your team. It appears Orochimaru has perfected it. He’s looking for a body.” 

“Do they all know?” Iruka asks, swallowing thickly. His stomach churns, remembering the tortured look on Anko’s face when she had returned from T&I with a seal burnt into her flesh around her former master’s curse mark. “All three of them, do they know the truth?” Kakashi nods, his hands curled loosely around his knees. Where Iruka feels jittery, anxious, adrenaline rushing through his veins at the thought of the genin suffering that, Kakashi has become impossibly still, a statue backlit by the fire. 

“They witnessed it. Sakura specifically. I’ve sealed it temporarily, but that’s why we’re out here. Finding someone who can do a seal like the one Yondaime did on Naruto is no easy feat, after all- we’ve got to match the power of a determined sannin to even come close to forcing the mark inert again.” 

“So who-” Iruka starts, then stops. Of course. Nothing Kakashi said was without purpose. If you had to match a sannin, you got another sannin: the only possible trump card in the deck. “You mean you know where to find them?” 

“I have a few connections,” Kakashi leaves it at that, making the seals in reverse to un-muffle the sounds of the night around them, and break down their barrier of silence in slow, melting steps. The amber light glows once more, and Iruka hears the symphony of crickets creeping back in, whining high and brilliant under the moon. “As long as we keep them safe until Jiraiya, specifically, sees Naruto with his own eyes, I have no doubt it will all work out.” 

Later, as he’s trying to sleep, Iruka will wish that he could have that kind of conviction- that he could avoid doubting how this will all work out. His head spins sickly behind closed eyelids as he remembers the nights he spent holding Anko down on the floor of some safe house they’d stopped at during a mission, calming her through yet another night terror only for her to wake up with blind eyes and no idea what she’d even been dreaming about. When Orochimaru had abandoned the village, so soon in the wake of the Kyuubi’s attack, Iruka knew about it mostly through the bare official documents released by the administration and bitter whispers falling from the upper ranks like leaves off of autumn trees. He wouldn’t have dared to bring it up with the Third by the time they had grown close- everyone knew that Hiruzen felt each utterance of his failed student’s name like a poisoned senbon to the jugular. The sannin was clever, slimy, opportunistic. Cruel as cruel can be, and able to slip through their ANBU’s fingers like sand dissolving in a stormy sea. 

It makes him shudder late into the night to think of how easily Orochimaru had realized what an opening he had, right there under their noses on ostensibly safe village grounds. It makes him feel even worse to realize that if he, Kakashi, and Jiraiya were unable to defuse the ticking time bomb Orochimaru had left them, he’d be responsible for whatever heartbreak Naruto and Sakura endured, watching Sasuke float out of reach of them all, a ship tossed in a tempest unbreaking. 

Iruka doesn’t sleep well, that first night.

* * *

It takes another day and a half to get to the camp that Kakashi claims is their rendezvous point. There’s a slow, winding river next to their spot, nestled between groves of trees and protected on the lee-side of a large hill. It takes little time to set up tents against the hill, nearly camouflaged into them by a quick application of branches and careful maneuvering through the thickets of bushes surrounding the clearing. Naruto is, of course, suspicious, but Kakashi sets him to some chakra manipulation training that seems to mollify him enough to keep him out of everyone else’s business for the afternoon. Sasuke is sullen and mostly silent, even when Kakashi is speaking to him about focusing the strength of his chakra on creating little electrical impulses. But Iruka catches Sasuke handing Sakura his umeboshi without looking her way at lunch time, and the small smile that creeps across her face feels like the dawning of a spring day. Sakura has taken to his chakra control lessons well, thus far, and so after lunch he sets about teaching her the alphabet of seals, with the intent to have her figure out how to combine them soon enough. He does love one-on-one teaching, even if it’s rather different from his usual task of damage-controlling a herd of tiny pre-killing-machines. Her first successful seal of the day is one designed to trap only certain sized fish in the fish nets they set out in the river. It’s supposed to let all the small fry wash away downstream to grow larger and be caught one day by other, more opportunistic fishermen. 

By the end of the day of training, Naruto is tired enough to curl up against Iruka’s side as Sakura and Kakashi work on grilling the fish they caught in some salt and herbs. He takes the contact gratefully, wrapping his arm around the boy’s shoulders and watching fondly as Naruto rubs his eyes sleepily with a dirt-smeared hand. It is, for a while, as though they’re back in the village, settling in for a night in their little shared apartment. In some small way, Iruka is realizing that he’s going to soon understand in a bone-deep way the grief and longing of every parent who drops their kid off at his classroom on the first day of school. These children, these beautiful incorrigible children, are growing too damn fast for even the trained eyes of a shinobi to catch. 

“I kind of miss my bed,” Naruto mumbles, pressing his cheek to Iruka’s shoulder. Over the months in which they’ve become a little family, he’d grown more and more comfortable simply intruding upon Iruka’s personal space. He can’t say he minds it, really. It had been a long time since anyone touched Iruka casually, like kin, curling into his bubble and cementing himself there. Even Asuma, as brotherly as he was, didn’t usually do more than clap Iruka on the back. 

“I kind of miss mine too,” Iruka murmurs conspiratorially, feeling his face soften with the warmth of his affection for the boy leaning against him. “But this is how  _ real _ ninja sleep on missions, right?” 

“Yeah,” Naruto yawns, his stomach grumbling faintly. “One of these days, though, I’m gonna invent a jutsu that makes those bedrolls more comfortable, though. You wait and see, it’ll be the most popular jutsu in all of Konoha.” 

“I’m sure it will,” Kakashi says, handing them each a skewered fish and a bowl of rice. “I know several jounin who would pay top price for that jutsu, in fact.” 

“I’m an  _ entrepreneur _ ,” Naruto says matter-of-factly, before he falls on his food like a pack of hungry wolves. In that moment, Iruka makes eye contact with Kakashi and feels a wave of unbearable fondness sweep over him. Kakashi’s visible eye is curved, a smile distorting the mask, and Iruka is caught off guard by the weight of his affection for the other man. They’ve had their argument about whether or not Naruto and his team were really ready for this- to become chunin, to fight to the death against people who would kill him without any hesitation- but Iruka knows now without a shadow of a doubt that Kakashi loves the boy. And it makes Iruka, in some strange, budding way, feel affection for Kakashi as well. This thing has been growing between them for some time now, held fast in the tangled nature of their connections like roots under their feet. It hasn't escaped his notice that Iruka now actively wishes for Kakashi’s presence, even when Naruto isn’t around to act as a buffer or a thinly veiled excuse. The curve of his jaw under the mask begs for Iruka’s fingertips to gently trace across it, and the line of his back as he sets new traps in the river for their breakfast tomorrow is a lure for half-formed, embarrassingly horny thoughts to coalesce in Iruka’s mind. He remembers the dreams he had back in the village, like teenage Iruka, infatuated with yet another impressive jounin he saw at the mission desk. 

But they are here, on this mission that’s going to slowly bury both of them alive, so Iruka chokes that part of his mind for the night. He settles back in against his boy and eats his grilled fish with a slightly less ravenous demeanor than the genin had before him, enjoying the smell of the forest and the fire and the low murmur of Sakura speaking softly to Sasuke even as Sasuke tries his best to pretend he’s not listening intently. Perhaps Naruto is fooled, but Iruka is, most of the time, not a complete idiot. He spends the rest of the evening watching the push and play of team seven all around him, and the comfort of Kakashi’s barely concealed kindness as he shuffles his tired students off to bed keeps Iruka warm until well into his first shift on watch. 

* * *

When he goes to get Kakashi for the other man’s turn on watch, he is polite about it- he doesn’t mention the name falling like ash from Kakashi’s lips, or the way his right hand twitches in a sick parody of rigor mortis. Kakashi looks at him like he’s wearing another person’s face for a brief second, grey eye haunted by the ghosts of the past. In that moment, Iruka wants so badly to reach out to him. To draw him in, press his forehead against Iruka’s shoulder, and anchor him in the present where there are three living, breathing reasons to continue on snoring away in the tent next to theirs. He wants to kiss the furrow in Kakashi’s brow, right where his hitai-ate meets his hairline. Instead, Iruka falls asleep in his own cold bed roll next to the dwindling reserved heat where Kakashi had lain, thinking about all the faces he sees in his own nightmares. In the vulnerability of the night, he and Kakashi are just two broken toy soldiers, tossed about by their village, left behind to teach their children how to march straight through fires and come out the other side breathing ice. 

* * *

Iruka wakes up the next morning to a commotion outside of the small campsite they’d made, drawing a kunai and slipping out of the tent before he’s even fully awake to find Kakashi squaring off against a tall man with a veritable waterfall of spiky silver hair. The two of them make a sight in the rosy dawn, hair shining like pearls and eyes flaring like lightning. Though Kakashi’s posture remains lazy, there’s an edge to it, like he’s expecting a fight that he knows he won’t be able to easily win. It’s disconcerting, to say the least. He knew that Kakashi had brought them out here to find Jiraiya, but actually seeing the legendary Sannin in person while Iruka stands here dumbly gaping in his ratty mission pajamas is quite another thing. 

“I’m not doing it,” Jiraiya says, arms crossed like a petulant child. “There are more important things than taking some snotty genin off your hands, pup.” Kakashi doesn’t even flinch at the familiar disrespect, slouching back even further with his hands in his pockets and a single eye trained on his opponent. 

“I knew you couldn’t resist,” Kakashi replies, speaking in that oblique way of his that has always frustrated Iruka. “You want to see him, don’t you? That’s why you’re here, despite all your empty protests.”

“You were on the way,” Jiraiya sneers, curling his lip with disdain. “Just thought I’d come tell you to fuck off in person. Didn’t trust those ninken of yours to get the message across.” 

“He looks just like him, you know?” Kakashi pulls a hand out, studying his fingernails with careful disinterest. It would seem a non sequitur, but his eye flickers towards the tent that Sasuke and Naruto are sharing in a calculated movement, just slow enough for both Iruka and Jiraiya to catch it. “But he talks like she did.” 

“You’ve got to be lying,” the other man sounds less certain now, his shoulders slumping slightly and his crossed arms becoming loose. _Yes_ , Iruka thinks. Kakashi’s got him, for whatever it’s worth. “They wouldn’t let a delinquent like you take the kyuubi out of the village on a goddamn _camping_ trip. How stupid do you think I am?” And then the tent next to Iruka is rustling, and a mussed blonde head is peeking out with irritated, sleep-bleary eyes. 

“I don’t know,” Naruto says crossly, with all the annoyance of a teenage boy woken from a dead sleep. “You  _ look _ pretty stupid, waking us all up like this. Who  _ is _ this guy, Kakashi-sensei?” For a long minute, Jiraiya simply stares at Naruto, face gone white like he’s seen a ghost. And then, in a flash, he’s right in front of the boy, hand gripping his jaw and tilting his face back and forth as the sannin eyes the whisker marks and those blue, blue sky eyes. Before Naruto can react, Jiraiya has turned back to Kakashi, a grim look in his eyes. 

“So it was all true, then.” 

“Every word,” Kakashi confirms, a slight nod of his head, and Naruto groans, stepping fully out of the tent and zipping it back up behind him. 

“Grown-ups are so freaking weird,” he mumbles, stumbling his way past Iruka towards the bushes. “Make them behave, ‘Ruka-sensei.” But Iruka doesn’t even know what’s just happened. How on earth is he supposed to make a sannin and the single most difficult jounin he’s ever met behave?

He makes breakfast.

He makes breakfast for a sannin, a jinchuuriki, Kakashi no Sharingan, the last recognized Uchiha, and a girl that looks altogether too much like the ghost of his own past insecurities. It sounds like a setup for a horrific joke. He keeps Sakura close to his side, helping him stir the porridge over the fire, and uses chakra to enhance his hearing enough that he can tell what Jiraiya and Kakashi are arguing quietly about by the river. 

“You’re still his brat, even if he’s long gone,” Jiraiya says, pulling a bitter laugh out of Kakashi, who looks away from him with haunted eyes. “It should be you teaching Naruto that jutsu. What do you really need me for, huh?”

“Even if I  _ could _ teach him that jutsu,” Kakashi sounds, briefly, like he’s speaking through a mouthful of rocks. “I wouldn’t. You made a vow to them too. You can’t run away from your responsibilities forever,  _ Jiraiya-sama _ .”

“Talking like that, you’ve got a death wish just like your father, do you?” Jiraiya spits, but his brow furrows with regret in the same breath, even as Kakashi barely reacts, just a little hiss of breath that by now Iruka has come to know well. They stand in stilted silence, Iruka stirring the pot mechanically, straining to hear his next words. When they come, they’re so quiet he can barely make them out. 

“I went too far,” Jiraiya sighs, shoulders slumping, and Kakashi relaxes minutely. Killing intent that Iruka hadn’t even fully recognized suddenly dissipates. 

“You did,” Kakashi agrees. Back in the genin’s tent, Iruka can hear Sasuke and Naruto bickering, a parody of the grown men by the river. Sakura cuts scallions into the porridge, looking for all the world like she doesn’t notice either argument. He knows better than to think she isn’t listening to both. “We both know the Akatsuki is on the move, Jiraiya.”

“They never should have sealed the world-eater in him in the first place,” Jiraiya mutters, but he puts a hand on Kakashi’s shoulder and gives a near-visible sign of surrender. “Cursed lots, given to children over and over again.”

“They shouldn’t have,” Kakashi murmurs, mimicking Jiraiya’s movement and curling fingers in the edge of his garish outfit. “But they did, and they’re gone, and he’s here. We have to keep that oath.” 

“For him,” Jiraiya agrees.

“For them,” Kakashi amends, and when they turn back towards the camp, Iruka and Sakura are dishing out bowls of breakfast, not a sign left that they’d been eavesdropping the whole time. 

Sasuke and Naruto sit on either side of Sakura during breakfast, staring at Jiraiya like no one had ever bothered to teach them a single manner in their life. Privately, Iruka thinks that Kakashi finds it kind of amusing, to see the legendary sannin disrespected like that. 

“So this is it, huh,” Naruto says through a mouthful of rice, after Jiraiya studiously ignores his gaze for several minutes. “You brought us three days out into the woods so some old man could teach us? Didn’t we already have a weird perv for a teacher with you, Kakashi-sensei?” 

“Naruto,” Sakura hisses, elbowing him so hard he almost goes backwards off the log he’s sitting on. Iruka struggles not to laugh at the matching expressions of disbelief on Jiraiya and Kakashi’s faces, schooling his own reaction down to a simple, measured, “Naruto, that wasn’t polite. Please apologize.” 

“Well,” Kakashi says, after a moment. “I suppose, if you don’t want to learn the Yondaime's  _ super secret techniques _ from his original teacher, then we can go back.” 

That’s all it takes to pique their interest. Iruka has to go back to the tent under the guise of changing clothes in order to hide his laughter at the sight of Kakashi playing them all like fiddles, one after another, from largest to smallest in order. 

* * *

When Jiraiya settles Naruto down with a water balloon in his hand, and Kakashi climbs with Sasuke up atop the cliff overlooking their campsite, Sakura finally grabs his sleeve with determined hands. 

“Sensei,” she says, in the fakest sweet tone Iruka has ever heard, as she leads him down the river. “Let’s go check our sealed traps from yesterday.” It’s a good tactic. They do have traps to check down there, and fuinjutsu to work on. If Iruka hadn’t heard her lie to her parents like that, week after week, about the danger she was in and the company she kept, he wouldn’t have picked up on it at all. They make it down to the second trap before she talks, furtively looking back and forth as though she could see anyone eavesdropping with her plain eyes. 

“You heard them,” he guesses, before she can admit her guilt. It’s a testament to how much she’s been through in the past three weeks that she doesn’t even look that guilty, in the end. Just determined, and maybe a little teary, but he lets that go. 

“So did you,” she points out, and he has to laugh. “If they didn’t want to be overheard, they should have used a muffling jutsu.” 

“I know Kakashi will be proud of that,” Iruka says, before he leans over to check the trap. “Here, look in this one, Sakura.” When she bends over, he shows her the three fish wriggling there, trapped against the current and the strings of chakra they left behind the afternoon before. 

“They’re the perfect size,” there’s a hint of pride in her voice. She reaches in with quick fingers, grasping them, using chakra to stop their wriggling so she can pull them up onto the bank. They flop there, desperately, caught in the trap of their own lungs, while she watches. With a dispassionate look in her eyes, she reaches out, using her kunai knife to spear each of them, setting them in the little basket she’d woven yesterday from various reeds around the riverbank. “We’re in danger, aren’t we, Sensei.” 

“Kakashi and I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” Iruka reassures her. She looks back at him with eyes that have aged a thousand years, the kind of tremble to her jaw that he saw when she thought no one was looking, watching Sasuke and Naruto in their hospital beds after the exams. He should have guessed that she would figure it out first; figure everything out first. In this moment, he knows that she’s well aware of her own feelings for her teammates, and desperately clinging to the hope that they will be enough. She knows all about Sasuke’s curse mark, watched it happen, watched someone spear her childhood love with a poisonous revenge. She knows about the beast within Naruto, and despite every fumble he makes, she still keeps coming back to his side. It would have been the smart thing to do, for her to reject Naruto’s promises, for her to leave them all behind, for her to put Sasuke on a shelf in her childhood bedroom and never look back. But Iruka knows it’s too late, because she’s finally realized what’s tying the three of them together, and now there’s no stepping back from it all. Just a civilian girl thrust into a shinobi world, clawing her way out the unmarked, clan-less grave of all the expectations put upon her by no fault of her own. 

He thinks about the way she whispered to Naruto in the hospital hallway, describing how Sasuke had broken the arms of the man that dared to touch her, and nearly killed the one who threatened Naruto. He thinks about the ragged, short cut of her hair that Ino had barely managed to fix in the dark shadow of the trees. She knows he is lying to her. 

“I have to be stronger than that,” she tells him. He almost shivers at the determination in her voice. 

“You do,” he agrees, putting a hand on her shoulder like it will make a difference. She leans into his touch gratefully, though, and together they collect the rest of the fish in the traps. At the campsite, she draws the seal alphabet into the ground, tracing it over and over again until the dust looks like the remains of an ancient city beneath their feet while Iruka guts the fish and washes them out in the bucket. Naruto looks frustrated,even at this distance, and Sasuke is nowhere to be seen. Iruka’s hands are covered in blood that won’t quite wash out from underneath his fingernails. He’s struck by the weight of the situation all at once, a crushing boulder that rolls down his spine, sinking his feet deep into the bedrock below. They make lunch, and Sakura brings Naruto his rice. She sits beside him to coach him through Jiraiya’s words in Naruto-speak, close enough, hand on his, that Iruka can see the pink on Naruto’s cheeks from his spot by the fire. After a moment of spying on the trio, he gets up to bring lunch to Kakashi and Sasuke. On the cliff, however, all he can find are scorched marks across the clearing and a single burnt feather, sitting in the middle of the blast zone.

On the wind, he tastes electricity. 

It doesn’t take him long to come across Kakashi, following the path of devastation until he sees the silver-haired man sitting under a tree with his legs stretched out, reading. He looks just like he always does, when Iruka finds him conveniently placed on the walk home from the Academy. Half-awake, eyes roving lazily over the pages, even though Iruka knows he can read much faster than that. It’s not so much reading as it is a meditation, at this point. Sasuke is further down the path of destruction, lying on his back and staring up at the sky, far off in some memory. 

“So it went well,” he quips, settling down beside Kakashi and handing him his lunch. 

“Clearly,” Kakashi says, voice dry as a desert, as he marks his page and sets the dog-eared Icha Icha down on the grass beside him. “We’ll get there.” 

“We have to,” Iruka lets his leg fall open, the edge of his knee brushing against Kakashi’s thigh as he takes a bite of the fish. This could be nice, like the lunches they’ve shared before. He wants it to be nice like that again. “You know, Sakura heard you, earlier.” 

“Would that she were my only pupil,” Kakashi sighs. “What a spy she could be, with hair like that and chakra control so fine-tuned that I didn’t even notice. I suppose it’s good that she’s curious, at least. Naruto wouldn’t know a deception if it hit him in the face, and Sasuke is so absorbed by his own personal mission that he simply doesn’t care.”

“She would have been stifled as a civilian merchant,” Iruka agrees, tilting his head so that he can see Sasuke’s prone form out of the corner of his eye. He debates the merits of speaking to him, even just to offer him lunch, but there’s ice about his posture that Iruka is certain he’s unable to melt. “Tonight, she’ll begin offensive seals.” 

“I hope you didn’t sugar coat it, Iruka-sensei,” Kakashi hands him back the empty bowl his lunch had been in, and Iruka takes the bowl and the title without offense. He knows the intent behind adding that suffix, in this context. Another reminder of a time not long enough ago in which he’d been naive, trying to protect them from the world that was coming to get them, sooner or later. Iruka moves his leg closer, pressing it up against the length of Kakashi’s leg, warm in the cool afternoon breeze. It feels risky, touching a dormant fire, like the embers might flare and catch him alight. 

“She loves them, Kakashi,” Iruka says, after a moment, not daring to face the other man full on and see how he’s looking back, an indolent wolf lulling prey into a false sense of security. “I’d no sooner lie to her about this than I’d lie to Naruto.” 

“You have a soft heart, sensei,” Kakashi murmurs, fingertips coming to rest against Iruka’s knee, hot like a brand through the fabric of his uniform pants. There is a carefully restrained energy in that touch, pressing firm into his muscles, and for a moment Iruka closes his eyes and imagines that Kakashi could use it to spread him open here on the ground and make him forget the fear curling deep in his belly with words, with hands, with lips. It feels like they’re drifting away from the children, their children. Kakashi’s words are no longer about the fact that Sakura, of all the genin, has guessed how serious their situation is. It’s not about the desperation they see in Sasuke’s eyes, or the fact that Jiraiya looked like he’d seen a ghost when he gazed at Naruto and thought no one was watching this morning. They are closer than he remembers being, cloth barely muffling the feeling of Kakashi’s breath from ghosting across Iruka’s face. The other man looks like he would eat Iruka  _ alive _ . Butterflies erupt in his stomach, spinning sickly, and all at once, Iruka tastes that familiar electricity again. “Would you lie to  _ me _ , Iruka?”

He breathes so deeply he can feel it in his bones.

“ _ Would you give me a reason to _ ?” 

Iruka breaks away before Kakashi can answer him, because this is not the place for dangerous conversations, for dangerous touches, for dangerous words. And it  _ is _ dangerous, this thing between them. In the village, Iruka invited Kakashi for dinner. He answered his questions, or grudgingly tolerated his propensity to nap in the Academy trees with his Icha Icha covers in full view of Iruka’s students. He fell harder and harder for the curve of the jounin’s smile, for the gentle way he skirted around children running through the village streets, for the laughing sarcasm he employed eating lunch under blooming cherry trees. There, Iruka was the captain, dragging anchors up until Kakashi fell breathless upon his ship. He had imagined kissing Kakashi up against the kitchen counter, before the team even went on a single mission outside the Land of Fire. He had imagined pushing Kakashi into his sheets and ruining him, cracking him open until the other man forgot the words the village gossips said about him in the marketplace. In Konoha, Kakashi would have said yes to Iruka’s offer of companionship, of time, of  _ more-than-this _ and certainly more than what they had been before. 

Here, Iruka does not know what his answer will be.

When Sasuke finally pushes himself up from the ground and comes ambling back towards Kakashi for more, still motivated by the fury and the angst burning in his chest, Iruka is barely visible through the trees, returning to their campsite. Kakashi stares blankly at his book, unseeing, unreading, unthinking. Near the tents, Sakura has the makings of a simple seal carved out on a log she’d obviously dragged back to the fire. Iruka talks her through the motions of activating it cleanly as he tidies up after lunch, pulling the rest of his sealing supplies out of the scroll and spreading them on the makeshift table Kakashi had put together. 

He can still feel Kakashi’s fingers on his leg until late in the afternoon. 

* * *

“Just focus, okay?” Jiraiya sighs, for the fortieth time that afternoon. He’s beginning to see why Kakashi insists it isn’t going to be him teaching the rasengan. Naruto, for all that he looks exactly like Minato, has most of Kushina’s temper hiding in his scrawny little body. He is scrappy, determined, blustery, brash. Everything Jiraiya remembers his student loving about Naruto’s mother, and more. There is an overflowing heart in there so big it almost hurts to see it in Naruto’s scrunched up eyes, but Jiraiya cannot seem to drag his gaze away. 

“I’m trying,” the boy groans, squirming in his spot and trying to focus his chakra towards one hand. “It’s just- ugh.” Jiraiya raises an eyebrow, but Naruto doesn’t even notice his vague censure, too intent upon fighting his body towards the desired outcome. They’ve been at it for hours, now, and the sun is high in the sky, beating down heavy on the back of their necks. He wouldn’t normally stay this long. Maybe he’d be at a hot spring, doing some research, or writing for his next manuscript. But he sensed the way Kakashi’s training with Sasuke had gone abruptly south earlier, and the younger man’s words are still ringing heavy in his head, cementing him there. 

It isn’t long before he hears footsteps behind him, almost quiet enough to be imperceptible. The girl. She’s good at chakra control, if nothing else, and he can see why she seems unremarkable compared to the other two. According to Kakashi, she won’t even be participating in the second round of the exams. At first, he’d wondered why she was even there. But then, watching her sit between the boys at breakfast, mediating their hotheaded outbursts. The way she carefully drew a seal over the pot to keep it warm, the curious gleam in her eyes when Umino-sensei was talking… 

It was like looking back in time. 

Not for the first time, Jiraiya thinks about all the things he could have changed, did change, had changed, and all the things he could not. She carefully sets lunch down next to the two of them, eyes only for Naruto until Jiraiya thanks her, and gestures for her to sit down. For a moment, Sakura watches Naruto continue to struggle, grunt and moan about how hard it is to direct his chakra. 

“Naruto,” she says, matter-of-factly, reaching out and wrapping her fingers around his wrist. “Remember when we learned to tree walk?” Amazingly, Jiraiya sees the top of his cheeks dusting pink at her touch. He leans back. 

“Of course I do,” he says, half-snippy and half-pleased puppy leaning into the warmth of Sakura’s hand, even though her grip looks anything but gentle. “I know, I know. You’re much better at it, because you  _ paid attention _ , or whatever.” Sakura takes a deep breath, gritting her teeth. Jiraiya imagines, for a moment, a blonde student he had years ago, sneaking looks at another girl with bright hair and a stunning temper. It aches deep, deep in his belly, like a knife to the gut. He’s seeing ghosts everywhere today, no matter what he does. These kids, these brats, these damn jounin guilting him into responsibilities he would just as soon escape, just as he has been for years. 

“ _ You’re such a _ \- you know what?” Her fingers uncurl, slipping up to lace with Naruto’s, palm to palm. She clenches her fingers until Jiraiya can hear the bones cracking together, and amazingly, Naruto’s face turns even more pink. It’s hard not to laugh. Idly, Jiraiya wonders about the hereditary nature of types. “Not the point, idiot. You’re trying too hard. You have to let the chakra flow out of you, but if you strain so hard, everything tenses up, and constricts the pathways. Take a damn breath and  _ relax _ , Naruto.” 

And then- oh, and  _ then _ . It’s just like flipping a switch.

* * *

“Open your eyes. Engage your sharingan, Sasuke,” Kakashi tells him, sitting in the shade of an ancient tree, palms pressed together and fingers steepled just under his chin. 

Eight years ago, Kakashi saw a sharingan much like Sasuke’s in the eyes of his older brother. He can vividly recall the clean, efficient swipe of Itachi’s sword across the throat of their enemy combatant. Itachi moved like a well-oiled machine, fluid and silent, deadly and unassuming up until his blade drew blood. He was unstoppable, a crow mask wreaking havoc, a good partner and a better brother, up until he wasn’t either of those things anymore. Sixteen years ago, Kakashi saw another sharingan awakened under stone-fall, and watched the forgotten Uchiha bleed for him. He abruptly misses them both, like hollow spaces in his body where organs once were. Everything has rearranged over time, the viscera moving to slot back into some facsimile of working order, but sometimes the phantom pain where they once were hurts worse than the initial injury. Now, at least, he has had time to consider what could have been, and that pain feels almost unbearable. It is for those three sharingan, for the teacher and student painting seals back at camp, and for Minato’s hellion of a son, that Kakashi persists. He tells Sasuke again-  _ engage your sharingan. Grab hold of your bloodright, boy, and make it yours.  _

“What’s the point of this?” Sasuke bitches, but his fingers are twitching like they already anticipate Kakashi’s next orders. They walk through the signs together, careful not to release anything. He knows that Sasuke has them memorized after the first time, because his eyes are blood red and the tomoe spins like a fat, lazy koi in a pond, waiting for its meal. 

Ox. Rabbit. Monkey. Ox. Rabbit. Monkey. Ox. Rabbit. Monkey.

“There is lightning in you,” Kakashi says, making the signs once more and this time focusing his chakra towards his palm, letting the lightning start to chitter-chatter bright at the tips of his fingers. “It’s powerful, powerful enough that you could punch through stone with it.” When Sasuke manages to direct his chakra correctly after an hour or two, the beginning of lightning blinding in between them, he grins, truly smiles for the first time since Kakashi sent them off into the Forest of Death without him. 

“Powerful enough to punch through anyone that gets in my way,” Sasuke remarks with a self-satisfied smirk, and all at once, Kakashi feels sick to his stomach. 

* * *

Iruka sits next to Kakashi at dinner, legs just inches apart but close enough that Iruka can feel both the intense prickle of the other man’s chakra and the searching gaze of the Sannin sitting across the fire. Their touch from earlier echoes on his skin again, even as Naruto rambles tiredly about finally being able to focus chakra into his hand, and Sasuke nods off sleepily in a bowl of soup. Sakura watches her two teammates, hands moving deftly over the set of brushes Iruka presented her with this afternoon, fashioned from bamboo and tucked away in his set of sealing instruments for just this occasion. She had managed her first offensive seal this afternoon, a basic paper bomb, so he has her wrapping linen and string around the brushes to make them the right size for her small, still learning hands. She smacks Naruto’s shoulder when he makes an off-color joke (more patient out here than she’s ever been in the village) and hesitates when she reaches out to press gently against Sasuke’s shoulder, pushing him upright when his eyes fall shut for a little too long. Kakashi hasn’t spoken much all night, not that it’s really that out of the ordinary for him, but something about training with Sasuke seems to have put the other man in a state of unease. Iruka simultaneously feels like he needs to get closer, to taste the lightning, to feel it burn across his skin, but also escape the obvious scrutiny Jiraiya is sending their way. It is the newly ingrained sense of being a parent combined with the need to remove himself from that pressing observation that forces Iruka up from his spot, herding the genin towards their tent and gathering their bowls in one free hand. 

“Bedtime,” Iruka tells them, ruffling Naruto’s hair even as the boy tries ineffectually to protest that he’s not that sleepy, unaware of the way he’s weaving on his feet even now. “You expended a lot of chakra today, all three of you. Sleep it off and you’ll be ready to go again in the morning.” They protest, as children always do (even children that are nearing fourteen and have a license to kill) but it’s pretty easy to usher them into their sleeping bags in the end. 

“I’ll turn in as well,” Jiraiya says lowly, shooting a glance towards Kakashi when Iruka returns to the fire. His geta click together like the beat of a drumstick ready to begin some otherworldly song, once, twice, before he’s unzipping the front of his tent. “Maybe even beat Naruto to the fire, tomorrow. Wake me if you need a third watch.” And then there are two of them, sitting by the embers, listening to the crickets chirp. 

“Check the perimeter with me?” Kakashi asks, half an hour into their companionable silence, not so much a question as a veiled suggestion. Iruka checked the perimeter earlier with Sakura before dinner, and Kakashi likely hasn’t needed help with such a task since he was six years old. “I want to know where you and Sakura laid all the traps.” Iruka knows that Kakashi could sense one of Sakura’s traps from fifty meters. He could probably see them with the sharingan, too. It’s not that they’re sloppy: they would catch enemy nin no problem, and one would be hard pressed to sneak past most of them. She followed Iruka’s hands well on each of the eight seals they placed this afternoon. Rather, it’s that Kakashi operates at a level likely close to the sannin sleeping just a few meters away. He doesn’t need the help of a chunin school teacher to locate them, even if said school teacher is one of the better fuinjutsu users in the village. So if Kakashi doesn’t  _ need _ his help, the easy conclusion is that for some reason Kakashi  _ wants _ it. 

“Of course,” Iruka agrees, like this isn’t the most obvious ruse to get away from the campsite he’s ever heard. Like he doesn’t know that Kakashi could probably match the kages in battle. Like he hasn’t seen the other shinobi report in to the tower, covered head to toe in blood that is most certainly not his own. He checks the wards around each tent before they head off into the forest, walking silently across the fallen leaves and brittle twigs. The pools of moonlight stretch out the further they get from the camp, swirling and puddling at the base of the trees. The first seal is dormant, burned into an oak tree, and only visible once Iruka sends a little spike of chakra through it. They check the lettering, the way it all curves around itself into a perfect circle on the bark. The second, the third. They hit the fourth, the farthest away, before Kakashi turns his own back to the seal and looks at him. For a moment, face shrouded in shadow, he just looks like Inu, standing in between the trees and ushering a wounded Iruka and a grinning Naruto home over a year ago. 

“Do you trust me, Iruka?” Kakashi tilts his head back, silver hair brushing tree bark and neck unsettlingly exposed. The glass strings between them break, all at once. Underneath that, he is answering for Iruka another question- does Kakashi trust  _ him _ ? Enough to show his throat, to lean back against a seal Iruka designed and implemented. Enough to lead him out here in the forest, far from the children they now inexplicably share. He realizes, all at once, that this is Kakashi tugging on the dangerous thread they abandoned earlier, without words that might incriminate them both in their emotional state. 

The dam shatters inside him, flooding him, paralyzing him with possibilities. Iruka could reach out and touch him, could press fingers against his vest and curl in, yank him forward, press him back. He could answer the question with his lips, murmur prayers into Kakashi’s mouth that they will make it out of this alive, that they won’t lose Naruto or Sasuke or Sakura to a war that started before either of their teachers were even born. He could imagine them back in the apartment, kids sleeping on the couch and Kakashi between his legs as Iruka sits on the kitchen counter, kissing him senseless. In another life maybe they don’t train children for battle, maybe the will of fire doesn’t mean putting your life on the line like this. In another life, he can guide Kakashi back to his safe bedroom and make good on the wordless promises they’ve been passing back and forth with every extra bento made and every lazy afternoon by the training grounds. But in this life, they are standing in a dark forest, and Iruka has a choice to make. Does he trust Kakashi? Does he trust him?

“ _ Yes _ ,” Iruka breathes, embarrassed by the way his fingers shake when he reaches out without thinking, waiting for Kakashi to stop him. To tell him he misunderstands. To remind him that he is weak. They are leagues apart in the village in status and reputation, for better or for worse, but here in the woods they are made equal by the desperation with which Kakashi takes his shaking fingers in one gloved hand and pulls him close enough that the moonlight blots out above them. “I trust you.”

“You know, this won’t make the rumors any better,” Kakashi murmurs, free hand slipping his hitai-ate up until his sharingan is exposed, blood red watching Iruka as he sees, for the first time, two eyes tracking his face in sync with one another. Once his headband is pushed up, a few strands of silver hair falling down his forehead, he grasps the edge of his mask and Iruka watches, mesmerized, as he slides it down. The edge of his jaw is sharp, his beauty mark endearing, his lopsided smile hungry and compelling. It’s no surprise that he’s handsome, really, as though the mask could have hidden it well enough that Iruka’s searching eyes wouldn’t have noticed otherwise over the past months in his presence. 

“What was it you told me about rumors?” Iruka asks him, curling the fingers of his other hand in the loops on the front of Kakashi’s flak vest. It’s an impossible feeling, being this close to him. He catches Kakashi’s smile widening, curling up, wolf’s teeth and the distinct glint of satisfaction, before the other man slides fingers into Iruka’s hair, pulls his head backwards slowly, and puts his face against the curve of Iruka’s throat. 

“You shouldn’t let them bother you,” Kakashi murmurs against his jaw, teeth dragging pink lines across tan skin. He struggles to form a sentence, memories and words slipping through his fingertips, sand through a sieve undone by the heat Kakashi stokes under his skin. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous, but they’re up against his seal and they’re on home-land and Iruka wants him so badly that his chest aches. Kakashi bites him, just under the collar of his shirt, just where it’ll sit tomorrow as a purple plum blossom spreading spring reminders of their flesh touching flesh here in the dark. His gasp echoes through his own ears, and he yanks on Kakashi’s hair unseeing, a blind man brought back to life. 

“Take your own advice, then,” Iruka huffs, tugging Kakashi back until he can slot their mouths together- what feral sort of man, biting him in some parody of a wolf’s claim before he even kisses him properly? The feral sort of man that Iruka adores, apparently- and he works on pressing Kakashi back against those long-dried brushstrokes. He expects a competition, having seen Kakashi dominate on the battlefield, but here he is nothing but a sweet, hungry mouth under Iruka, hands clutching at him like he might melt away any moment. Kakashi makes a rumbling, ravenous noise deep in his chest when Iruka sucks his lower lip, bites at it, draws just a little bit of blood, getting his hand up underneath Iruka’s black shirt and grasping him hard enough to leave marks. Closer, closer, closer, laughing a little against the other man’s cheek when he slots a thigh between Kakashi’s, pushes up and watches Kakashi’s head drop back like he’s been electrocuted. So easy, so much easier than he thought it would be to yank down that infernal mask even further and give as good as he gets, sucking bruises into pale skin and drinking in every desperate little noise half-choked out under his teeth. Tomorrow, they’ll all be hidden back under that navy blue fabric, the marks of Iruka’s ownership, making Sharingan no Kakashi his and only his in the silver light of the moon. Kakashi’s hips roll against him, breaking his reverie and bringing him back with a sharp burst of sensation that burns up and down his spine. 

“I thought you wanted to check the seals,” Iruka teases him breathlessly, made bold by the endorphins, made strong by the way the jounin’s cheeks turn red, flushed with pleasure. 

“You trust me,” Kakashi gasps, gritting his teeth against the feeling of Iruka’s teeth in his shoulder, like it answers everything all at once. “I trust you,” he breathes out shakily, fingers gripping at Iruka’s back, and their kiss is gentled by the admission when Iruka finally returns to his lips. Iruka cups his jaw, smooth and sharp all, and kisses him like they might never leave this spot, until the both of them know they must. 

“Tell me I’m doing the right thing,” Kakashi asks of him when they finally break apart, soft enough that Iruka could pretend he didn’t hear it if he really wanted to. He laces their fingers together, helping Kakashi pull his rumpled mask back up, tugging that hitai-ate down over the hungry sharingan. 

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you were,” he promises quietly, stuck there in the quicksand darkness, sunk deep in the feeling of orbiting Kakashi like their gravity has become inextricably intertwined. And that- what they’ve done- doesn’t answer most of his questions about them, but for now Iruka will hold him tightly and take whatever he can get. He leaves Kakashi out as first watch, knows he’ll see him in a few hours when it’s his turn. But his bedroll feels cold without the heat Iruka had felt between them, and the tent feels empty, and he dreams about a time in which he could have dropped to his knees right there and had Kakashi on the shadowed forest floor. 


End file.
